Frank Lloyd Wright
[1867 – 1959]
Fallingwater,
1935 - 1939
Perspective drawing of Edgar J. Kaufmann House, 1936.
Copyright © the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
• Frank Lloyd Wright was an American
architect, interior designer, writer and
educator, who designed more than 1,000
projects, which resulted in more than 500
completed works.
• Wright promoted organic architecture was
a leader of the Prairie School movement of
architecture.
• Fallingwater is a man-made dwelling
suspended above a waterfall.
• It offers an imaginative solution to a
perennial American problem: how to enjoy
a civilized life without intruding upon the
natural world.
• Especially in the United States, which had
once possessed infinite acres of unspoiled
land, technological progress almost
always comes at the expense of nature.
• A long tradition of American landscape
painting had developed partly to satisfy
city dwellers with restorative glimpses of
the countryside they’d left behind.
• Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow
• With Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright went
one step further—designing a house
nestled into a mountainside, with views
that made the house appear to be part of
nature itself.
• Fallingwater has been described as the
"the best-known private home for
someone not of royal blood in the
history of the world."
• Fallingwater was commissioned by Edgar
J. Kaufmann, founder of a prominent
Pittsburgh department store.
• To escape the pressures of business,
Kaufmann and his family regularly left the
city for their sixty-acre woodland retreat in
the Allegheny Mountains.
• By 1935, the Kaufmanns’ country cabin
was falling apart, and Wright was invited to
design them a new weekend residence.
• Kaufmann undoubtedly envisioned a
house overlooking the most outstanding
feature of the property, a mountain stream
cascading over dramatically projecting
slabs of stone.
• Wright believed that a country home
should become part of the landscape
• Perched over a waterfall on Bear Run in
the western Pennsylvania highlands, the
rural retreat has also been called the
fullest realization of Wright's lifelong ideal
of a living place completely at one with
nature.
• He studied the site from every point of
view before making the audacious
proposal to build the house on the side of
the cliff.
• The waterfall itself would be invisible from
the interior but wholly integrated into the
plan, with a stairway from the living room
giving direct access and the rush of falling
water always echoing through the house.
• Wright had never been constrained by
convention, but even for him, the design
for Fallingwater is a stunning feat of
invention and one of the most original and
groundbreaking concepts in the history of
architecture.
• A traditional country house would have
been set back from the road on a
manicured lawn with a pleasing view of the
wilder regions that lay safely beyond its
boundaries.
• Wright reversed that idea.
• Fallingwater, a large, low structure
hovering like a boulder over the falls,
seems almost as much a part of nature as
apart from it.
• Fallingwater is like a piece of
contemporary abstract art from the
twentieth century that we have looked at
during this class.
• It’s been simplified into basic, essential
shapes without added ornamentation.
• What shapes do you see?
• Every element of the architecture is meant
to blur the distinction between the natural
and built environments, and to integrate
the residents into the out-of-doors.
• Reinforced-concrete cantilever slabs
project from the rocks to carry the house
over the stream.
• Deeply recessed rooms, fieldstone
interiors, and unusually low ceilings create
the impression of a cave—a private,
sheltered space within the natural scheme
of things.
• From the living room, a suspended
stairway leads directly down to the stream.
• On the third level immediately above,
terraces open from sleeping quarters,
emphasizing the horizontal nature of the
structural forms.
• Fallingwater is constructed on three levels
primarily of reinforced concrete, native
sandstone and glass.
• Soaring cantilevered balconies are
anchored in solid rock.
• Walls of glass form the south exposure,
and a vertical shaft of mitered glass
merges with stone and steel to overlook
the stream.
• If, through light and sound and structure,
Fallingwater evokes the feeling of existing
in the unspoiled American wilderness,
everything else about it is unmistakably
modern.
• The house is a marvel of twentieth-century
technology.
• Although it proved impractical for all sorts
of reasons, it was the architect’s (if not the
client’s) dream house, and Wright would
not permit a single alteration to his plan.
• The most striking element of the design—
and the biggest engineering challenge—is
the series of reinforced concrete terraces
cantilevered above the rocky ledges and
parallel to the natural lines of the site.
• Although firmly anchored in solid rock, the
terrace platforms appear to defy gravity;
Wright compared them to trays balanced
on a waiter’s fingers.
• Between the terraces are rooms with glass
walls—transparent boundaries between
inside and out.
• Walls not made of glass are built of locally
quarried stone, and the massive, central
fireplace is composed of boulders
removed from the site to make way for
construction but restored to form the
hearth, the traditional heart of a home.
• As the distinguished scholar and
architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable has
observed, the effect of Fallingwater “is not
of nature violated, but of nature
completed—a dual enrichment.”
Styles associated with
Frank Lloyd Wright
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Prairie Style
Mission Style
Craftsman Style
Arts and Crafts Style
Stained Glass
Oak Park, IL
Winslow House, Forrest Park, IL
Florida Southern College,
Lakeland, FL
Kentuck Knob House
Essay Question 1
• Why might a city dweller enjoy this house?
• Imagine being on one of the balconies.
What would you hear?
Essay Question 2
• The Kaufmanns wanted a vacation home
on their land.
• Why was the location that Wright chose for
the house a surprise to them?
• Where would most architects probably
have located the house to take advantage
of the natural waterfall?
Essay Question 3
• How is Fallingwater like a piece of
contemporary abstract art from the
twentieth century?